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Leaking Gender

As I’ve said before, if I had stronger anchors to the male gender, I could see my self being content with occasional cross-dressing. But at this point my friendships and social life are pretty much with people who know me as some sort of feminine gender. More through happenstance than intent, since performing takes up a lot of my time and it’s how end up meeting people.

At work there’s definitely leakage.

Since I dress for (and usually win) the annual Halloween contest as a female character every year, there’s definitely outness in that regard.

I’ve been wearing nail polish off-and-on for a while — the putative explanation being that I had back-to-back shows, and didn’t want to have to redo them. But for the past couple weeks I’ve been wearing polish full-time, albeit a subtle “professional woman’s” champagne color, and no one’s said anything.

After that “real names” protest at Facebook, I can to work en femme — with the putative explanation that since I was behind for the day because of taking the morning off, it was faster to just change outfits than to remove make-up, showers, etc.

Then there’s a couple co-workers who are Facebook friends, and given what I post there, they definitely know I’m trans.

I’m sure there’s personality differences now, e.g. I’m more expressive, but I actually don’t feel I present that differently. Especially in a work environment. Although FWIW, the things I had to work on a few years ago to get promoted were the critiques stereotypically aimed at women (e.g. needing to be more forceful in presenting my opinions, being a bit too consensus seeking, etc.)

On a different note, I confess the thought of experimenting with hormones crosses my mind periodically, and earlier this before I started this post I even tried OTC estrogen supplements for a month or so — and yeah, I know self-medicating is a really stupid thing to do, and so I stopped. Plus they didn’t seem to make any difference (which I now know is because the dosage is comparitively low). But it was one of those “maybe that’ll give me a clue where I’m at” things, since a lot of people report feeling “right” when they go on hormones.

I think part of it is that doing burlesque decreases my social dysphoria but has a tendency to increase my body dysphoria. OTOH, like my overall trans-ness, the body dysphoria waxes and wanes.